


And If I Feel A Rage

by livbartlet



Series: Leah Campbell: OFC of Awesome [3]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, Mirror Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 10:08:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5782045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livbartlet/pseuds/livbartlet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for #8: Sin and Grace, from the 100 Fairy Tale Prompts List.</p>
<p>Three months after McCoy returns from the <em>other</em> universe, the dark mirror, he still wakes up in the middle of the night, sweating, gasping for breath. Haunted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And If I Feel A Rage

Three months after McCoy returns from the _other_ universe, the dark mirror, he still wakes up in the middle of the night, sweating, gasping for breath. Haunted.  
  
It's in the things he doesn't say, all the details left unfilled, that Leah gathers the ideas of what he saw, what he relives every night in his sleep.  
  
He barely touches her. Not since he came back nearly broken and his fingers dug into her skin with a painful desperation and bruises bloomed the next day.  
  
He swims through nightmares she can only imagine - this is not entirely true, some things are not left to her imagination, she kissed the other McCoy and she tasted the difference - he dreams and remembers in the bed they share, but she hesitates to cross the inches between them. And he doesn't touch her.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
She cries out, in pain, and immediately wishes to take it back. He is returned to her, her love, _her_ McCoy, and he needs something from her in this moment - forgetfulness, absolution, she will ponder it in the after - but she doesn't know what it is in the now that his rough fingers and fierce eyes are asking of her.  
  
If you do not know the question, how can you begin to answer?  
  
She cries out in pain but lets him continue. Over coffee the next morning, he startles at the bruises on her wrists. She lets the more painful marks on her thighs and her ribs go unspoken.  
  
It is only when Christine gives her a startled look in a corridor and summarily hauls her off to one of the secondary Medical bays that Leah discovers the marks on her neck, the hairline fracture in her left wrist.  
  
So early in the aftermath, she does not think beyond the moment.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
_Least said, soonest mended_. She knows it's a pile of bullshit. Knows from experience - trauma and long, painful recovery - but conveniently forgets in the face of Leonard fracturing by tiny degrees before her eyes.  
  
He doesn't touch her and she doesn't say anything, especially anything along the lines of _Do you want to talk about it?_  
  
They grow apart in subtle, small ways. Sharing a bed, quarters, the mundane details of their lives, but ignoring the big things. Ignoring the incident, the return, the bruises.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
He grouses and grumps and growls his way through any day now, and to anyone who doesn't _know_ him, he seems in top, true form.  
  
He tries, once, to kiss her goodnight - leans over her for a moment, plays two fingers through her hair across the pillow, presses dry lips to her forehead for a fleeting instant. She would capture and hold him if she dared, pull his lips to hers, open and heated, tell him without words all the things that burn inside her.  
  
They are no more silent than they used to be - conversations are what they were - but their bodies are muted.  
  
They are ghosts.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
The nightmares get worse, even as his day face becomes more easy and practiced. So Leonard stops sleeping and Leah cries silently, pained and helpless, in their bed, as he nurses a drink in the dark of his favorite chair.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
Christine worries about her, about McCoy, tells her as much over a bottle of contraband wine, late one evening.  
  
"I don't know what to do," Leah half-sobs into the glass.  
  
"I know, honey."  
  
When you are living on a fault line, it takes more than an earthquake to really shake you.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
  
"Leonard, I'm leaving."  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"The quartermaster has approved my request. I'm moving out."  
  
"But, Le - "  
  
"Don't."  
  
"You can't leave, I can't, I'm not..."  
  
"You left a long time ago." She kisses him on the cheek, inhales the mingled scents of him - soap and bourbon and _him_ \- "I love you. That part isn't changing."  
  
And like a coward, or a brilliant strategist - she is not sure which - she walks away.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
Sympathy and judgment come in equal and unexpected measures.  
  
Scotty stops speaking to her, full stop, and then she finds herself reassigned to Security - pushing paperwork for Cupcake, of all people.  
  
But the meatheads in Security are decent guys and soon she is training in hand-to-hand combat and studying interrogation techniques and every possible escape route from every possible place she might end up cornered on Enterprise. It's like having the big brother she never had, times a dozen.  
  
It's no replacement for anything, but she throws herself into it anyway. Work is a better panacea than anyone ever gives it credit for.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
Three certifications and a promotion later, she's standing on a transporter pad with a phaser strapped to her waist and an itch under her skin to wade into the fray and do something with the new muscle on her frame.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
"It always starts with an away mission gone wrong, doesn't it," she says to him, later, whispering into his skin the things she cannot scream.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
He's waiting for her, when she arrives in the dark parallel and wonders why she's looking at bulkheads instead of sky - not-her-McCoy is waiting for her, and some part of her is not surprised, even as the rest of her shrinks from the hunger in his eyes and the memory of the ways he was different and wrong.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
"I'm so sorry," he whispers in return, his fingers following the skip-step of the fine new scar along her ribs, the scar she refused to have erased.  
  
"I'm sorry, too," her voice is thick with tears and guilt and something unfathomable.  
  
He moves inside her and she knows only relief, completeness, forgiveness.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
He spares her the agonizer, at least, the dark McCoy. But that is the only good she can say for him.  
  
Dark Spock gives her a dagger, and hope. She stabs and turns it between dark McCoy's ribs, counts his last breaths and begins to count the ways this place might be the ruination of her soul.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
It's Kirk who serves as her confessor, hears the whole story, grants her what absolution he may.  
  
It's Leonard who knows before she begins to tell, knows the horror that will always have some place inside her mind. It's Leonard who knows and shares.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
The dagger is bloodied twice more before she escapes the dark universe.  
  
"Thank you," she mouths to not-so-different-Spock before her molecules are ripped apart and put together in the place she is supposed to be.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
"Leah! Leah, honey, I'm here. I'm here." It's him. _Her_ McCoy, not the other. "My god, you're bleeding."  
  
She's bleeding, she realizes. But not dead. Hand-to-hand combat training has its uses.  
  
"I'm sure it does," he says as he carries her to Medical. Only then does she realize she's babbling.  
  
  
\- - -  
  
  
"I'm not going to break, you know," she says to him one night when the lights are dim and he's throwing back the covers on their bed. Since her return, there has been no question of not living with him, not holding onto him. But he is too tender, too tentative, and she is not made of glass.  
  
"I know." He slides into bed beside her and props himself up one elbow to face her.  
  
"Then show me. We're both here. After everything, we're both here."  
  
"I'm not losing you again."  
  
"Never," she agrees.  
  
He takes her for her word and in their bed they finally rage together against the darkness and the pain and drive away the ghosts.  
  
Together, they mend.


End file.
